One Foot in the Grave (13 page)

“We'll just come in and have a word with her, sir, if
y
ou don't mind. Have a look out in the garden, Jim my lad. That yell came from somewhere at the back. Hey! No, you don't! …

Two in the morning. Sergeant Stacker's tall brow gleaming in the office gaslight. “Can't expect that sort of excitement every time you go out on the beat, my lad. They'd known all along, those neighbors, but it's not the sort of street goes talking to coppers.” Telephone tinkle. “Hello. Hello. Yes … if I weren't a religious man … thanks for letting me know. Jim, my boy, they've found another pit in the garden. Three more, and not one of them ten years old. That makes nine … and if I hadn't been showing you round the manor.
. . .”
Stacker fatherly, solemn, doing his best to reassure the new recruit, but himself shaken, shaken …

“Good. Good. Slow your heartbeat a little. It's too fast. Slower. Slower. Good. Blood pressure up. Up. Good. Good. Watch the light. The light. The light. Now I want you to forget everything that happened before you came to Flycatchers. Forget everything before you came to Flycatchers. Watch the light. Forget everything before you came to Flycatchers.”

The crack was wider now; wider not because of any further irresolution in the voice, but because of a rebellion inside Pibble against the command, a command, effectively, to cease to be. He was what had happened to him before he came to Flycatchers. Time since then had been a vacuous afterlife. No! He watched the light still, but was aware of himself watching it. He heard the voice, but was conscious of its being Dr. Follick's voice. And Jenny was waiting in the anteroom. …

“Watch the light. You've let your heartbeat slow. Faster a little. Faster. And your blood pressure. Raise it. Raise it. Good. Good.”

It was important to accept the voice, to watch the light. The process was healing. There was some other reason … no matter. He let the light obsess him again, allowed the voice to become disembodied. But swimming down into these vaguenesses he clasped to himself that central No which he had clutched from the surface. He would not forget.

“Now tell me what Mr. Crewe is thinking.”

Mike is thinking about one of his girls, the Greek one, probably. Water rattles on the car roof, not because it is raining, but because the traffic is jammed under the as yet unfinished M4, whose construction seems to produce this drizzle. Pibble watches Mike smiling to himself, and feels that mixture of envy and contempt with which the sexually impacted confront the free-and-easy. A twitch of movement beyond Mike's profile, minute but characteristic. “Don't look for a moment, Mike. We've been recognized. Chappie in the Jaguar next to you. Can't put a name to him.” Pause. Four men in the Jag seem interested in something further over. Mike twists, winds down window, adjusts wing mirror. Jam moves. “I think I know the chappie in the back, sir. Difficult from that angle, but it might be Dicey Martin.” “Sure?” “No.” “Still, they knew who we were, I think.” “Yes, sir. Sergeant Colnaghi was saying something in Mess last week about Dicey Martin getting ready to pull a big one.” “Colnaghi's in Serious Crime, isn't he? Like to stop and give him a ring? We've got ten minutes to spare. Let them get away first. …”
Which was how Martin and five others were picked up halfway through the Heathrow Bullion Raid, and how Mike Crewe got his file moved into the rapid-promotion sector.

“Good. Good. Keep your heartbeat there. Steady. Steady. Raise the blood pressure. Raise the blood pressure. Watch the light. Steady. Steady. Forget what happened to you before you came to Flycatchers. Can you forget it? Can you forget it?”

No! yelled the mind, but the drugged lips merely mumbled the dimmest of negatives.

“Very well. Now keep the heartbeat steady. We're doing fine. The blood pressure is up a little. Keep it there. Keep it there. You are going to practice raising your blood pressure three times a day, at nine, two, and seven in the evening. Three times a day. Nine, two, and seven. You will practice. Now you can relax, relax. Good. In a minute I will switch off the light and you can wake up. Relax. Relax. Now tell me how much you know about what is going on.”

“That's the sickening thing about our job, young James. If you're any good, you get to know what happened, more often than not. Like a traffic cop, you can look at the skid marks. But that's all past history. What wouldn't you give to know a bit of present history? Tell me frankly, young James, how much do you know about what's going on?” A slight lowering of the voice was enough to change the emphasis of the last sentence. Beyond the partition the clientele of the Seven Stars boomed bonhomie. Dickie's glance, intent but mocking; his wallet out as if to begin ordering a fresh round; Dickie casually letting it fall open.
. . .

Light became dark.

“. . . tenners, the old sort,” a voice was saying. “A great mound of them, half a year's pay. He was letting me see them on purpose.”

The voice was Pibble's own, quiet but remarkably firm for the first few syllables, but then dwindling into a weary mumble. He stopped talking. The dark became the daylight of the surgery, with the ghost of that intense spot still swimming through it in greens and reds on the retina. Follick came round to where he could look down at the stretcher. The excitement was still there, mixed now with an air of baffled wonder. Another goldfish bowl had become a bunch of tulips, evidently.

“Sorry about that, James,” he said. “I got a bit further in than I meant. You see, the idea is to concentrate your physical attention on things like the light and the grip in your hand, and your mental attention on mental events by getting you to talk. I lure the sentries out of the way, if you see what I mean, and that allows me to sneak in and plant a few suggestions into the autonomous nervous system while the normal control levels are distracted. It'll be interesting to see if we get anywhere. You're quite a good subject for your age, you know. How much can you remember?”

“Not much … like dreams … Dickie Foyle … Mike … old Stacker …”

“Don't worry. That's why I sent the nurses out. It's all in absolute confidence.”

“Ur.”

“You're not too tired?”

“No. Feel as if I'd had a rest, lying here.”

“Good. That's just how you should feel. Now, there's something else I'd like to have a word about, if you're up to it. It's not medical. … In fact, I need your advice. Mr. Brackley, one of our senior shareholders, gave me a ring this morning—doesn't normally happen, but they're getting a little jumpy, and they asked me. … Tell me, do you know anything about a patient we have here called Wilson?”

“A little. He paid me a visit a few days back.”

“Did he now? … Well, in that case … look, obviously I can't expect you to tell me anything confidential. I'll just assume that you know as much about this Wilson chappie as I do—which, since he's not my patient, was nothing at all until Mr. Brackley telephoned—and I rather gather from his tone that
he
hadn't really been told anything like the whole truth and if he had we wouldn't have taken Wilson on. … You know we make a special feature of our security arrangements? That's the reason Mr. Brackley got on to me—I do the liaison on the medical side. …”

(Of course, thought Pibble. The electrically controlled shutters. A typical Follick gadget.)

“You see, people who really want that sort of service don't mind what they pay. But they've got to be sure it's working. A murder on the premises isn't a very good advertisement, but at least it was a security guard who was shot, and in some ways that's a plus—shows that the system is functioning, and that it's needed. We can cope with that. What's really worrying the owners now is having these troops of policemen all over the place, inside the building, getting nowhere as far as anyone can make out. That is very bad for morale, and in this sort of business, which depends so much on word of mouth, a few weeks' dissatisfaction can result in two or three years' loss of profits. You follow?”

“You want to know how long the investigation will go on?”

“Yes.”

“Can't say. If they don't solve the case, they won't close the file for a long time. Might still be a couple of officers working on it for a year.”

“Here? At Flycatchers?”

“No. It's not only Tosca, it's Wilson. If they decide Tosca's death had no connection with Wilson, they'll concentrate on his other activities and probably clear it up in a couple of weeks, and you'll be rid of them after that. But of course that'll probably mean the arrest of somebody inside Flycatchers—not such a good advertisement. But if they find there was a Wilson connection, then the murderer's probably from outside and they can investigate that just as well—better—from their own centers. But they'll want to keep a few chaps on here till they are pretty sure Wilson's safe.”

“They won't take him away?”

“They might; depends whether they can find anywhere else as good. You'd know about that, more than I would.”

“There's a couple of places. … Thanks, James. I get the picture. I'll tell Mr. Brackley. Now let's get you unplugged.”

Pibble lay still. He felt weary and relaxed, but remarkably well and clear-headed. He had positively enjoyed explaining the logical outcome of the police investigation, putting the sequence of events together in coherent sentences instead of letting Follick fish sense out of a jumble of half-senile mutterings. He watched Follick remove the terminals and the moon-man hat, and then stride to the anteroom door and open it with a characteristic flourish, as though it were a cabinet from which he had triumphantly vanished the two nurses.

And replaced them with what? Just as characteristic as the door-opening was the suddenness with which the gesture stopped, unfinished, while the eyebrows rose in unashamed surprise at what the cabinet now contained. Maisie and Jenny came stiffly into the room, both flushed, and with Jenny's cap crooked and her hair (normally as neat in its natural curls as the orderly arrangement of scales on a mackerel) half tousled. It looked as though Maisie had been crying. Kerry followed them into the room, his face transformed by a wide, vague grin which gave him a look of daft benevolence, like the bamboozled ogre in a folk tale.

As the stretcher drifted back through the corridors, Pibble let his tiredness take hold. He slept and only half woke when Kerry lifted him effortlessly across into his own bed. Familiar blankets closed around him. He heard the door whimper, click where the stretcher jarred it, and close. Fingers settled round his wrist and found the pulse.

“Sound as a bell,” he murmured.

“Jimmy!”

He opened his eyes and saw her face above him, cap still awry, hair out of place.

“You're a patient,” she said. “You're not allowed to play tricks on the staff. Only April the first.”

“A ration of one trick will be issued to each patient. … Wasn't there a chap called Bertie Foster-something?”

Awake now, he was aware that something had happened during an earlier period of unconsciousness. Whatever it was left him with a sense of almost hysterical exhilaration, the aftermath of victory. The Old Guard, maimed, leaderless, marching with ancient muskets, had fought off a computerized modern army. Cracking good show, Pibble—pity you can't remember what the battle was about.

“Foster-Banks,” she said. “He was frightful. He once put itching powder in all the wheelchairs. His jokes weren't funny at all. We got up a deputation saying that either he left or we did, but it wasn't any good. He turned out to be a big shareholder. One of the owners.”

“What happened?”

“He died before it got that far.”

“What they call a merciful release. Something's happened to your hair.”

“I was fighting with Maisie.”

“Uh?”

“She wouldn't let me listen at the door. Goodness, she's strong. Kerry just stood there grinning. I suppose it must have looked like a bit of silent movie, me trying to get to the door and Maisie holding me against the wall and tears lolloping down her cheeks and neither of us saying a word.”

“Why? …”

“You're my patient, aren't you? I have to know what's going on, and. … It was almost as if he'd summoned up a devil or something—there was this strange voice going on and on; it took me ages to work out it must be you—and Maisie wouldn't let me listen! What on earth were you on about?”

“Don't know. He put me in a trance and made me talk. Idea is you make the mind distract itself, or something. … When I came to, I was telling him about Dickie … trying to bend me …”

“Don't try and tell me now. You're tired.”

“. . . Didn't bring it off …”

“I could see that.”

“Uh?”

“It's a look men have. When they want something and they don't get it. I'm not blind!”

She let go of his wrist and swung away from the bed, snatching his pajamas from the back of the chair and then standing irresolute, as if not sure why she was holding them.

“Jenny?”

“Yes!”

“Tosca. He wanted. …”

She turned very pale, and then a raw and mottled blush suffused her face and glowed like a rash on her neck. Her mouth worked as though something glutinous were stuck to her teeth.

“Must know,” he muttered.

She shut her eyes and deliberately controlled the fit. Paler than ever now, she bent her head as though she was studying the texture of his pajamas.

“Yes, he did,” she said in a flat voice. “And no, he didn't. If you ask me anything like that again, ever, however much you need to know, I shall leave and go somewhere else.”

Pibble dozed the early evening away, physically and emotionally exhausted. Self-pity and boredom—pity for his boredom, boredom with his pity—wound through their endlessly reiterated reel. Jenny had left the radio on, but it remained gibble-gabble in his ears. The time pips for the seven o'clock news seemed to break the trance, and though the news itself was nothing but strikes and bad-weather blues, he listened to it. When the loathed Archers followed, the stimulus was enough to make him switch the machine off and simply lie, thinking, till supper came. His thoughts were not about himself, and surprised him by their coherence.